Jack
Since I was 16 I’ve had two best friends. Rudy was my main running buddy in Mobile. Jack was his Memphis counterpart. They couldn’t have been more different, at least at first.
By the time school started in my sophmore year of high school, I’d moved to my father’s. He lived in a suburb of Memphis. One day, not long after school started, my little brother and I were playing basketball in a neighbors driveway. This tall, lanky guy came up and introduced himself. Jack had just walked into my life.
Physically, we were probably quite a sight. I was 5′2″, he was already 6′2″. I think we both weighed about 150 pounds. We both liked basketball, though, and chess too. By the next summer, Jack was my best friend. That first summer we forged our friendship fishing and frog gigging the farm ponds that are ubiquitous around Memphis. By the following summer substance abuse was our primary hobby.
Jack was very charismatic. He had a positive genius for making people feel special. He was also very manipulative, even at the beginning of our relationship. His MO was to make people feel like they were winners, and for my money that’s one of the cruelest things you can do to somebody, especially if you know they aren’t. He knew better.
Jack came from a broken home. His father was a rich, ner-do-well playboy who had managed to get a law degree and pass the bar. I don’t think actually worked much, but his parents were loaded. He lived in on Henrietta Dr. or St. or whatever in Birmingham. I doubt there’s a better address in that city. Jack and I would go see him when we were still in our teens. He’d give us drugs and we thought he was cool. Jack’s mother liked Valium. To what degree I never knew first hand, but I think she had a problem with it.
Like Rudy, Jack’s mother was his primary enabler. She managed to keep him in line some of the time. But Jack was much smarter and more talented than Rudy. He managed to find a way to live high on the hog, which for him meant lots of cocaine and strippers.
After my devastating initial crack experience, when I managed to get sober and stay that way for seven years, Jack started shooting up heroin. Had I been around, I’d have certainly been involved. In fact we actively used to try and find heroin in the belief that it would help us control our crack addiction. Fortunately for me, we never did. (In all my time on the streets I’ve never seen it.) It think it’s much more plentiful now, almost certainly in large part because of the US’s involvement in Afghanistan. Jack finally managed to get a heroin connection. With in a couple of years he was sick, went to the doc, and leaned he’d contracted hepatitis C.
I think Jack may have actually wanted to get sober at one point. We went to several meeting together. I sponsored him, temporarily, before turning him to my sponsor. I knew I couldn’t handle him. I knew my sponsor, who was very intelligent could. Jack dropped out shortly thereafter, mostly, I think because he couldn’t wrap D., our sponsor, around his finger. At that time he still wanted to drug more than not.
After I’d been sober a little over four years I left Memphis. I never saw Jack again. We talked on the phone a few times a year some years, some years not at all. He slipped, mentally, a lot during that time. He liked to rant about conspiracy theories and blather about the end times and Jesus. He’d lost a good portion of his mind.
He died in October 2007. I’ll probably never know exactly what happened. His family knows, but they ain’t talking. It doesn’t matter anyway. For whatever reason, the intelligent, even gifted guy that Jack was couldn’t come to terms with his addiction. Most never do.
